It is probably due to a number of people stopping using their alts after some instance hopping.
Also a few people who came to see how it was, and weren’t attracted enough to become regular visitors.
Curious to see at which number we’ll stabilize.
Next peak will probably happen after either major features release (e.g. exhaustive mod tools allowing reluctant communities to move from Reddit) or the next Reddit fuck up (e.g. removing old.reddit)
Stats on each server: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list
And at the beginning everyone was worried about “Eternal September”. It’s only been two months.
People will come in waves, instances and communities will grow and die, just like how it was on reddit, we’ll probably start seeing meme/politics free or even more specialized instances soon. But all of this is going to take time.
The turning point will be when companies/websites start spinning up their own Lemmy instances as their official one to replace their forums, which I think will happen.
So, being on Lemmy is a long term investment for me.